Tag Archives: Golden thread

On the wings of love – talk by Maria Bartels at the Symposium ‘The golden thread of the free mind’

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In the castles of the Occitan nobility and in the houses of the Cathar faithful, in the hymns and the poetry of the troubadours and in the sermons of the “perfects”, there was a word that was perhaps at the very heart of Occitan culture and society in the 12th and 13th centuries: amor.

However, two distinct Greek concepts underlie the Latin term amor: eros and agape, concepts that originally had nothing what­ soever to do with each other and which are, in fact, opposed to each other. What worlds are concealed behind them, and in what way do they form the basis for Catharism and the fin’amor? How did these two kinds of love come together in the Occitania of those days? And how can they still come together in our own souls? Continue reading

The caves of Volp – talk by Robert Bégouën at the Symposium ‘The golden thread of the free mind’

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The Tuc d’Audoubert and Trois-Frères caves were discovered in 1912 and 1914 by three teenagers, Max, Jacques and Louis Bégouën, in a village in the Ariège called Montesquieu-Avantès. They are large and decorated caves, and the decision to preserve them completely intact was taken immediately after their discovery. This point of view, very original for those days, is explained by the fact that at the moment of the discovery of the caves, the family had already been interested in the origin of life in general and in the origin of mankind in particular for two generations.

The grandfather of the three brothers, count Maximilien Bégouën (1826-1885) was indeed an erudite and multilingual humanist. Although trained as a Continue reading